Abstract

Crumpled sheet materials appear at different scales ranging from crumpled graphene composed of nanoscopic structural units to crumpled paper balls and crumpled foils. There exist a number of studies analyzing fractal geometry of crumpled materials, while their mechanical properties are not well addressed in the literature. In the present study the uniaxial compression of crumpled graphene is simulated with the help of molecular dynamics and the results are contrasted to the experimentally measured stress-density curves for differently packed crumpled paper balls. The distinctions in the mechanical response of the two studied materials are discussed based on the differences in their structure.